On the Road

A couple of days in Harrisburg were fit into our crazy schedule last month for some newspaper publisher training and networking. One of our publishing organizations held its regional meeting in early March, and our dogs came along. Bull and Spookie are good travelers, though Bull tends to try to climb up into the front seat with us. His big head often rests on my shoulder, or arm. When we need to have dinner or attend a meeting, they settle in for a sleep in the car.

After the first night’s meeting and dinner, we all settled into the hotel room. We brought a blanket for them to sleep on and set a water bowl down and food when it was time. We were in a beautifully laid out room on the first floor, with new everything. The hotel was in the midst of renovation.

The interstate was just a few hundred feet out back, so I set the hotel heating unit to high fan mode to mask the highway noise.

Our room was close to our meetings. It was also close to other conference rooms, and there was to be a wedding. It proved to be quite fancy some of us joked that we should be “crashers,” but they were dressed far more elegantly than we were.

We had a successful meeting, we learned things,

by Seth Isenberg

made some new friends, and generally had a good time.

One of my conference tasks was to pick up a publisher, a friend, at the Harrisburg train station. As we had brought the dogs, this meant loading up the dogs to make the pickup (I couldn’t leave the dogs alone in the room). It was a ten-minute ride, and as I arrived, our friend had just reached the front of the station. As a treat, I took her on a miniloop tour of the state capitol, past the statehouse and PA Museum before the quick ride back to the conference.

When I had to bring her back to the station the following day, I parked and paid the meter to accompany her into the station. The station’s front hall is a beautiful older design with polished wood and marble, but in the bridge area that extends over the tracks, the place had a distinctly old bus station feel old wood benches and a dingy paint scheme. When her train arrived, I went down to track level to see her in (and to experience a little bit of the Harry Potter movie…). I’d never done this before. As I made it back to my car, I was able to see the train slowly pull out towards Philadelphia and NYC.

See ON THE ROAD, page 26